Navigating Belief, Skepticism, and the Afterlife | Alex O'Connor @CosmicSkeptic | EP 451

in the early church there was a debate around the physicality of Jesus's resurrection yes so the canonical tradition ends up uh stipulating that Jesus physically resurrects and you must believe that otherwise you're herit yeah and that's part of the the Catholic particular emphasis on the Divinity of the body a lot of the Gnostic tradition says that the thing that that's being gotten wrong is the idea that there was this literal Resurrection right no no the kingdom of God is here and now the resurrection is inside of you and you you attain it through nosis I

mean the Gospel of Thomas doesn't even mention the resurrection doesn't mention the crucifixion it's a list of sayings yeah and the the very form of that of that collection shows that these people believed that the thing that's important is not what Jesus did but what he said [Music] so I'm here today speaking with Alex o Conor who's flown in from London I'm in La um he's known also as Cosmic skeptic and he runs a podcast within reason and so you can subscribe to and listen to that podcast watch it on YouTube Alex was recommended to

me by a friend of mine John Veri who was a who is a professor along with me at the University of Toronto I've done a lot of different public events with with John many conversations and uh Alex has interviewed many of the people that I'm interested in including Richard Dawkins and he is very interested in religious matters although he's not a Christian and we believed jointly that it would be useful for us to meet and to hash out our differences in Viewpoint and similarities and see if we could get together move together somewhere valuable and

enlightening and so that's what we're trying to do that's what we try to do with the conversation um it focuses mostly on the nature of belief I suppose that's probably the easiest way to sum it up what it means to believe something what it means to have a religious belief what it means to be committed to a belief um we talk fair about too a fair bit about the distinction between let's say the distinction between fact and fiction and the idea that fact reflects the real but so does fiction and so welcome to the discussion

of all that so first of all thank you for coming here it's a long way from London we're in LA and so that's a long ways and so um and in so far as you're going to disagree with me I'm pleased that you're exhausted from the flight because that'll slow you down and that'll be helpful so anyway seriously thank you for coming and course so let's start with this Cosmic skeptic right okay so how do you come up with the name and and and why the conjunction and what's what what do you think the advantages

if any in relationship to the emphasis on skepticism I'll give you the official and The Unofficial Story the official story is that Cosmic sort of implies universe space big thinking and skeptic uh sort of situates me within a tradition of people who are interested in interrogating their beliefs uh to their sort of fundamental uh fundamental grounding in so far as that's possible and skeptic is sp with a K because most of my American most of my listeners are are American The Unofficial answer is that uh when I was younger I knew a guy who was

a musician and started a Soundcloud account with the word Cosmic in it and I thought hey that sounds like a cool word and I was starting a YouTube channel I wanted to sound something that sounded cool and I thought Skeptics sounded cool next to it and I spelled it with a K because I got it wrong I see okay okay well well who knows the actual derivation then it's a good combination though because it it well it's catchy so that's nice from a marketing side but it also has this it's an interesting illusion to the

combination of Revelation and critical thinking that actually makes up actual thinking right because the problem with being concerned with a vast plethora of ideas is that many ideas are misleading and wrong and so you have to learn how to combine that openness and curiosity with the capacity to separate the wheat from the chaff and that's the utility of skepticism I mean it can degenerate into a kind of argumentative nihilism that's the downside but properly applied it it uh it separates the wheat from the chaff right and the purpose of that is to keep the wheat

well skepticism can only ever be essentially destructive because you're being skeptical of something somebody's putting something forward and you're sort of responding to that with skepticism and so for a lot of people if if skepticism is the thing that you do then you sort of end up chipping away and ending up with nothing whereas skepticism is really supposed to be a tool that you use it is destructive but in the way that you might sort of um carve a piece of marble you're intending to get a statue out of it at the yes yes well

that's the thing to always keep in mind is skepticism in the service of something exactly yeah it's a tool it's a methodological tool it's not a you you mentioned too and so I'm interested in your progression in your thinking in relationship to that because you mentioned just before we actually went on air that had you come to see me a couple of years ago you might have been more inclined to I I'm putting words in your mouth to some degree so correct me if I'm wrong to strive for a victory or to make your point

something like that and you will alluded to the fact that your thinking around that has changed to some degree I suspect that's probably a consequence of experience so what's changed in part it might have something to do with becoming a podcaster and speaking weakly to people and you can't keep up that energy you can but it becomes totally unwatchable and and nobody wants to nobody wants to engage in that all the time I think there there are times when it's worth doing and to be clear you know I still like to to disagree and do

so essentially unapologetically and bluntly and that can still come is quite rude but I think that the way that I would think about a conversation is that well what what are we about to do here a debate we're about to debate an issue and I'm going to try to win and and that's and not not even I mean maybe there's sort of an element of pride in there you want to for that sake but also you really think well I want to win because I think I'm right about this and if I don't then you

know I must have just not expressed myself properly I I think I you know I what I probably meant when I was saying that is that I would have had more of that cap on than now after having so many conversations with so many people and realizing that not only is it more constructive for myself I've learned a lot more you know now now I'm here like hey I might you know I might learn something today that would be great even if I just learn something about what your worldview is um but also people listening

just unanimously say that they prefer it it's it's a much well this the skepticism so one of the things you learn as a therapist for example is that being right is not very helpful especially when you're trying to help someone because whether you as the therapist is right right has very little to do with the positive outcome for them you still want to maintain the skepticism and there one of the ways of doing that in the manner that's helpful is that like if I'm talking to you and you say something I don't understand that's the

right place to be skeptical because if I don't understand what you said well it might be my ignorance but it also might be like lack of clarity and pointedness on your part m and so one of the advantages of disagreeing with someone is to point out to them in a positive way where they're lost in the fog because if you're sufficiently lost in the fog you tend to run into sharp objects and that's not very pleasant so but the skepticism and and this is obviously what you alluded to I would say as a consequence of

learning from the podcast is the skepticism should be in service of rectifying your ignorance rather than in service of making your point or winning the argument problem with winning a bloody argument is that the victory can seduce you into thinking that you were correct and you're never sufficiently correct right yes and so I don't like debates fundamentally I've never really enjoyed them I probably when I was really young yeah you know be before I was I I stopped doing this when I was about 23 I would take a certain amount of pleasure in being able

to obtain intellectual Victory you know it was also way I defended myself when I was young and it was effective but it's not the optimal way to conduct a conversation this is one of the reasons why people like Rogan are so successful because Joe Joe will push his point but he always does it in the service of learning yes he doesn't do it in the service of victory yeah yeah I I think I think you probably put your finger on it there um but what you were saying a moment ago about Precision about sort of

thinking clearly and understanding somebody else clearly I think the reason why I'm excited to speak to you today is because you're someone who celebrates being precise in your speech and I've always appreciated your your desire to make sure that you're really understanding what somebody else is saying I've made attempts in the past to I mean my channel is mostly focused on the philosophy of religion yes and I've made attempts in the past to try to understand your worldview yeah your religious world and I made a video essay um and some of the things I said

there I think I at least one thing in particular I'd probably think I was wrong about but what I was trying to do there I've seen that people would ask you on on interviews and podcasts you know do you believe in God do you think that Christianity is true and it was sort of you would sort of struggle to answer the question and I thought to myself well people come at the question with a prior commit commitments about what they think truth constitutes yeah that's a big problem there there must be something important that's being

left out of the the sort of precondition of that of that question or conversation if if it's so if it's so unimaginably difficult to answer you know um well I'll give you an example I I watched that essay this morning right and I also wanted to talk to you about your discussion with Dawkins yeah so people say ask me for example do you believe in God and I think well I don't know what you are driving at with that question because I don't know what you mean by believe most people modern people believe that a

belief is a description of accordance with a set of facts sure right well I don't think that's what belief means in the religious sense in the least so I just think that's a non-starter something to do with what you act out right it has to do with what you're what you believe is what you're willing to die for fundamentally is what you're committed to or live for if you think about it as life in the most extensive manner it's a matter of commitment so I understand what you what you mean in the religious context religion

is a big topic religion is is a is a is a mighty you know area to be to be talking about but when I talk about belief in a more mundane sense like I I believe that this chair exists yeah like that is a belief that I hold I sort of can't help but that Bel I can see it well that's a place where you're action and your statements align exactly you believe in the chair and you're sitting in it it's like fair enough which is why I I totally agree when you say that what

you believe might really be what you act out but I think when when people are looking for essentially definitions and just a second ago you said well what is it to believe and you said well what you believe is what you're willing to die for yeah I'm not willing to die for my belief that this chair exists maybe maybe in a broad sense if if if not belie if not believing that the chair existed required me to sort of give up my trust in my sense data right then I might literally die by accident by

sort of walking off a cliff cuz I don't trust my eyes anymore so also not something that you to forgo given your role let's say as a rational skeptic right seriously like it's a commitment that you've made to a certain view of reality but but you understand surely that when somebody asks do you believe in God although they're asking the the sort of subject of the belief yeah is a much more Grand uh entity the word belief itself for them at least in their question even if you think it's an inappropriate question they mean something

much more mundane they mean you believe in well it's hard to know it's hard to know what people mean you know like one of the things I've noticed for example is um there are no shortage of Christian Trolls MH right I mean there are atheist trolls and there's engineering trolls there's lots of trolls but there are Christian Trolls and the Christian Trolls when they ask that question and it's often the Christian Trolls who ask that question what they mean is are you in my club exactly right and my answer is I'm not even sure you

know what club you're in so there's a trap in the question which I don't appreciate cuz I don't like like questions that have traps in them yes um now not not everybody who's asking that question has a trap but many people do and so I find that off-putting let's say because it's manipulative in terms of that that descriptive belief that's something we could go into I think we should do that because it does get to the core of the matter that you were attempting to untangle let's say in your essay yeah I mean my my

understanding of of and I had to sort of piece together different things you'd said in different interviews and I suppose the reason I had to do that was because I didn't have you in front of me so I'm grateful to have the opportunity now it it seems to me that when you speak of God you mean something like that which is at the I don't know if you'd rather say the basis or the top the basis or the top both metaphors of a value hierarchy and it begins with the recognition that anything that anybody does

requires some kind of value even just to do something as as simple as sitting in a chair or picking up a glass well you don't do anything without it being oriented towards a value exactly right and so even to perceive the glass it's something you've spoken about before you know why do I see the glass as one object uh even though it's got multiple Parts it's got a side and a bottom and top I I see them together in a way that I don't see the the cup and the table as one object well you

said before it's because I can grip it it's sort of functional it's because I can use this cup and the reason that I see it in that way is because I can then drink from it and the reason that I I want to do that is because I sort of value my health and and there's sort of a a value uh regress that goes on and more broadly this this comes out in the question of like you know why you writing an essay to get a good grade or why you why do you want a

good grade to get a good job why do you want a good job to get money and you keep going back and back it has to terminate somewhere that's right because otherwise there would be nothing to sort of lend that that value well otherwise you'd always be in an infinite reg right you just die question infite yeah you literally you're it's the kind of um regress in which the value that you have for for a actually borrows the value from from B you don't you don't you don't value a at all without B so it

doesn't get it without B and B doesn't get it without C and get it without so that went on infinitely there's nothing to give the the entire sequence value in the first place and so there's got to be something at the basis here and then you said at least on on one occasion that we'll call that place whatever's at the top there we'll call it the Divine place and you said we'll make that y now I'm kind of I'm fine with this but it seems to me that that what you're doing is you're giving a

definition of God that makes himal or makes it him whatever unavoidably exist and also makes it a quite different entity to The Entity described by a great deal of for instance your Christian uh your Christian listeners who will say that God is not the the basis of a value hierarchy God is an omnipotent omniscient agential being with Consciousness that intentionally brings about human beings and sent down a physical man to sacrifice his life in order to save us for our sins now that means that when someone asks you does God exist and you say well

look I I I think that's that's almost an inappropriate question I in at times you sort of imply that you don't even believe in atheists because you sort of act as if you believe in God if what you mean by God is just well dkin himself admitted he was a cultural Christian that's another matter because that's much more specific I mean that's cultural Christianity right this is just Al a ref but but you know when someone when a Christian says to you I I'm being very clear that that's what I mean by God I don't

know if you do believe in the omnicient omnipotent agential being but if you start talking about the inevitability of believing in some basis of a value so obvious it's not so obvious from the traditional judeo-christian perspective that God is properly conceptualized as a being that's that's right well so so It's Tricky right because one of the ways that you can approach God traditionally is in relationship to a being but that's a veil so why do I say that okay so so let's speak about it religiously first then we can speak about it conceptually so there's

a tremendous insistence in the judeo-christian tradition that God is outside of the categorical structure right like seriously outside Elijah the prophet establishes that God is not in nature he's not in the earthquake he's not in the configration he's not in the storm right so that doesn't mean that nature doesn't speak of God but it does mean that whatever God is is not in the natural world okay now we can extend that not bound by time not bound by space well does that mean make God a material object because when people say is God real which

is a variant of the question is do you believe in God it's like well God's immaterial and outside of time and space so if your definition of real is material things in the domain of time and space then we're not talking about the same thing now usually people approach that question of belief with some materialistic framework like that in mind even if they don't know it the Christian let's say um who put this question forward in the hope of getting the answer they want to hear are materialistic and Enlightenment Minds even though they don't know

it because they have an implicit definition of what constitutes real is God real it's like no no God's hyper real that's not the same thing I think that the the physicality of God is an interesting question yeah in the in the Old Testament tradition it seems to evolve as as far as I can see if you look at some of the the earlier Des ions of of God you've got a God who you got a God who walks through the Garden of Eden yeah you've got a God who has a council of of of angels

and and the accuser you have a sort of it's being at least conceptualized as a much more physical being and as time goes on God becomes uh less localized and I I've heard a lot of theories as to why that's the case I've just done an episode on my own show yeah I'm not I'm not sure that's true exactly I don't think there's a clear historical progression like that there is a constant tension between God as ineffable and then God as Manifest in a manner that's comprehensible right and if so mer eliad mapped the consequences

of this out to some degree so he was very interested in nich's proposition that God had died M most people including n regarded that as like a unique historical event there was a religious tradition the enlightenment arose in consequence we became skeptical about God and in 1850 the philosophers decided that he was no longer necessary or real but eliad who who is a brilliant historian of religions has noted that this has happened many many times that God has vanished disappeared and one of his explanations for that is that a God that's too ineffable so that's

completely outside of the categories of time and space let's say and who doesn't make himself present as a being who doesn't have a Heavenly Council who has no hierarchy between the Pinnacle and Earth itself tends to float off into space becomes so abstract that you can't have a relationship with it him and then he disappears in many ways this is what Christianity provides with the New Testament and the figure of Jesus and that's why I think for a lot of Christians the more important question for you and the question that they're interested in and and

you're quite right that a lot of people are like I want to get you on my team I have no dog in this fight I'm not a Christian but I know that a lot of Christians are frustrated when they begin asking about Jesus who's a much more physical entity right it's a real human being it's someone in flesh and blood it's someone who's physically crucified by the very different questions very different question and then and then is is seen as a physical entity at least according to the to the canonical tradition by his disciples after

he died yeah so when somebody asks you do you believe that that happened and when I've seen you ask about that question you tend to still speak in terms of the psychological and the mythological I think the frustration is that as you've just said yeah thatting Christians on at that regard either because the truth of the matter is with regard to the gospel accounts that the mythological and the historical are inex inextricably cross-contaminated sure there's no pulling out the historical Jesus right that just that's that's a non-starter the and why that is I don't know

it's it's very it's very mysterious it's very hard to understand as is are are the let's say the accounts of the Resurrection okay so what do I think about that well I don't I think that denying the historical reality of Christ is I think that's just a Fool's errand I don't know why anybody would bother with it so so a man exists called Jesus we that much now Christ now there's a claim that that is attributed to Christ that he is the embodiment or the Incarnation the Fulfillment let's say of the prophet and the law

yes I think that's true uhhuh yeah what does that mean well you know what did I think it's in the Gospel of John I think Gospel of John closes with a statement that something like if all the books that were ever written were written about the gospel accounts that wouldn't be enough books to explain what it happened all the things that Jesus did yeah yeah and it's and it's there's a there's a truth in that the truth is that profound religious account is bottomless and the biblical representations are like that there's no limit to the

amount of Investigation they can be not least because the text in itself is deeply cross referenced so there's like there's an innumerable number of paths through it it's like a chessboard and so it it's it's inexhaustible in its interpretive space that's true and that's a problem too because it it means it's also susceptible to multiple interpretations including potentially competing interpretations I think a lot of people interpret pool for example um the earliest New Testament source as saying that if Jesus did not literally rise from the dead if if there was not a man who stopped

breathing and then started breathing again then your faith is futile and you're still in your sins that is Christianity is undermined now that means that and Paul doesn't say sort of believing that that's false is really bad he says if you do not believe this proactively yeah then your faith is the problem I have with if you don't proactively believe that yourself then I think when a Christian asks you you know do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus are you a Christian I think you must be committed to saying no at least under that

interpretation of Paul and and even if you're not sure I mean it's fine if if I say to you do you think that a man physically rose from the dead and you say something like well I don't know I mean I wasn't there but I think it has a lot of mythological significance or I think that maybe it happened in in a different sense or it happened in the sense that good fiction happens you know then fine but it needs to begin with that caveat of of the simple sort of historically speaking I don't know

and I know you don't like to pull out the historical Jesus that's a good objection it's an important question no of course it's a very good ction so the so I just did a seminar on the gospels with crew of about eight people and was the same crew that walked through Exodus with me with a couple of variations and we spent a lot of time on the resurrection accounts for example and of course that was the toughest let's say that was the toughest morsel to chew and digest the thing about the resurrection accounts is that

they're all look so I could say something like this which will just annoy people but it doesn't matter I believe the accounts but I have no idea what they mean when you say you believe the accounts do you mean and and I I hate to be sort of yeah pedantic here it seems pedantic but do you mean you believe that these are things that happened such that if I if a Str I know you don't like that let me put it this way if if I went back in time with a Panasonic video camera and

put that camera in front of the tomb of Joseph of arthea would the little LCD screen show a man walk out of that tomb I Would S suspect yes so that that is that to me seems like a belief in the historical event of the Resurrection or at least of Jesus leaving the tomb which means that when somebody says you know do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead it doesn't seem clear to me why you're not able to just say it would seem to me yes because I have no idea what that means

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your privacy secure yourself with the number one rated VPN visit expressvpn.com Jordan to get three extra months for free that's expressvpn.com Jordan go to expressvpn.com Jordan to learn more h i mean I suppose one look look here's here's let's let's let's approach this obliquely let's say the miracle of the Loaves and the fishes yeah okay so people will say well do you believe that happened literally historically it's like well yes I believe that it's okay okay what do you mean by that that you believe that exactly yeah so so you tell me you're there in

the way that you describe what are the fish doing exactly and the the answer is you don't know you have no notion about it at all you have no theory about it sure so your belief is what's your belief exactly I think a Christian might say something like my belief is that I have no idea looking at those fish what I would see in the process of them being converted into enough food for the 5,000 to eat I have no idea what I would see but I do know that what I would see is the

fish end up being spread amongst the 5,000 in the same way like if I opened up the the water jar what would I see when the water became wine I have no idea does it sort of blend from one color into another does it suddenly snap does it disappear and then reappear I don't know but what I do know as a Christian is that I would see something at some event in which when I look at the beginning it's water and when I look at the end it's wine and I mean actually I don't mean

that Jesus turning water into wine is some kind of you know uh inextricably mythological story and the question of whether it happened sort of doesn't matter or maybe it happened in a meta manner or maybe it happened in a in a hyper reality sense I I I would be as a Christian ined more I'm more inclined rather than to believe I'm more inclined to understand and then when I hit the limits of my understanding I think I don't understand that now do I believe it or not believe it I think often especially with regards to

biblical matters let's say I'm I just I have a suspension of belief and disbelief yeah that's fine too I think part of the reason that I've been able to Be an Effective interpreter of the biblical texts and a relatively scientific interpreter is because I approach the texts with respect the same respect that I would approach a lab animal it's like I don't know what this is like I seriously don't know and I'm not going to come at it with axiomatic assumptions that are unquestionable I'm going to try to see what's right in front of my

eyes I'm going to try to see what mystery reveals itself if I take this phenomenon seriously this is one of the things that I find puzzling for example about Dawkins because Dawkins formulated the idea of meme which is by by the way the same idea as archetype it's exactly the same idea except he just stopped it's like okay there are memes they're selected for okay selected on what basis exactly does that mean there's a hierarchy of memes are the memes more likely that are the memes that are conserved more likely to be what would you

say viable organisms and if they're viable organisms are they microcosms this is really interesting in in terms of the survivability because there's a point I I've spoken to Richard Dawkins well a a number of times but twice on my podcast and the second time somebody pointed out to me that there might be a point of agreement between you two that that has been overlooked which is that I don't know if you've ever come across the The evolutionary argument against naturalism or the argument from reason the idea that if you're a materialist you can't trust your

your reasonable faculties so Alvin planting have formulated this very well very geniusly I think in saying that if you believe that evolution by natural selection happens materially what does natural selection select for survivability so if you're a materialist that means that the very rational faculty that you're using right now evolves not to be sensitive to truth but to survivability yes that's right and if that's the case well why do you believe in the truth of evolution well because you've been rationally convinced of it but the thing that you've just ascented to the belief itself has

just undercut the process by which you that Bel there's a whole the the the New England pragmatists figured this out in like 1880 now I think this is a fascinating I think it really is just a it is it's exciting it's that's for sure that's for sure it's actually a point where Darwin and Newton do not come together how do you mean well the darwinian definition of true and the Newtonian definition so here's the thing here's the thing you had a conversation with Sam Harris you've had you've had a number but one of them I

don't think it was a live event I think it was before that you're talking about truth yeah and awkward first second talk I had with him I was it was extremely ill it do you know it was awkward to listen to because it felt very much like and I remember at the time thinking you know what is this this Jordan Peterson talking about like truth is like darwinian truth is about like survivability what what do you mean truth is true true the way an arrow flies yeah right and now I asked Richard Dawkins about the

evolutionary argument against naturalism I said well well how can you know that what you believe is true and he said because believing true things makes me more likely to survive hey boy watch where you go with that at the time but I thought to myself afterwards it was one of my commenters on on on patreon actually had had mention he was listening to Rich and I said but you know but okay maybe but sometimes it's at least possible that something that's false helps you to survive you know the rustling in the bushes believing that that's

a lion every time or tiger even if it's not that helps you to survive because that one time that it is you're still going to run away and it costs you nothing to run away when it's not a tiger so believing it's a tiger even when it's not is going to help me that's why we have a negativity bias yeah and and and D says well yeah of course there are some circumstances where believing something false could be beneficial to survival and I said well how do you know that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is

not one of those and it seemed as though he would he he was just saying that believing that would not be advantageous to our survival which might well be true but if that's the case then suddenly I'm listening to what you're saying about uh truth being more sort of darwinian and related to survivability and I think maybe you two would agree there and I think well why is it that when you sit down with Richard Dawkins you find it difficult to have a conversation with each other and and well I think it's partly because we

don't know each other very well that's right and so and also there are things he knows that I don't know and there are things I know that he doesn't know now I would say in my defense that I what would you say I'm more of aware aware of the things he knows that I don't know than he is of the things I know that he doesn't know right so for example as far as I can tell Dawkins doesn't know anything about the yian tradition of literary interpretation and that actually if you're going to talk about

religion that's actually a fatal flaw right so and you know he's called me for example drunk on symbols it's like well the imagination is a biological function and it has a structure and a purpose and it has its own logos its own intelligible order and if you're not aware of that order that doesn't make me drunk on symbols it just means you don't know what you're talking about now that that that frustration that that you uh appeal to there when you when you hear Richard Dawkins um I think Terry Eagleton said that listening to Dawkins

on theology is like listening to somebody who write a book about biology whose only knowledge of the subject is having once read the Great British book of birds and okay fair enough that but that actually turns out to be a real problem and it's a problem with regards even to the meme idea because you don't have to extend Dawkins work very far to understand that religious stories are memes sure right yeah well and and there's a hierarchy of memes and some of them are very functional but then here's the thing like that frustration that you're

sort of throwing in that direction I think people throw it throw towards you and when when you say well religion you don't have to look very far to see that religion is a meme well without further clarification and of course this going to be it you can understand why to to somebody first listening that sounds almost atheistic or religion is a meme no religion is not religion is not a true historical account of you know the the history of the universe it's not a true historical account it's a meme now it it when you say

that when you say that the resurrection of Jesus well what does it mean historically that the spirit of God brooded upon the primordial Waters like what does that mean historically no one no one knows what me historically think I don't think that at least most of Genesis or parts of Genesis are supposed to be I mean the the Bible is a is a is a library right it's not a book and that means that it's going to contain different genres that's for sure and so when when some of them are more historically accurate and some

of them tilt more toward words that that kind of elusive I don't mean elusive in the I mean a l l i yeah sure right that that Elusive and symbolic form that characterizes Genesis one so because there are different genres here it depends on what story we're talking about and I think what I often observe you doing is we might talk about uh Christianity and if you aren't comfortable committing to a historical ideal you'll start talking about the the spirit moving over the face of the waters which is which is obviously a much more mythological

ideal um and not not quite equivocating them but but moving between them too quickly and and not delineating them enough so if if I asked you you know do you think that the spirit moved across the face of the waters and you said to me something like I think it's still happening right what I would say say hey fair enough yeah that makes sense it always happens it happened at the beginning of time and it's always happening when somebody says did The Exodus story happen did did the did the Jews enslaved in Egypt Break Free

of their slavery and move to the promised land across the desert for for 40 years did that happen MH you have also said of The Exodus specifically it's still happening yes now to me that's far more inappropriate than saying that the spirit is still moving across the face of the waters because I think what people mean there is do you believe that these people in that time period actually did this in such a way that for instance might show up in an archaeological report well I think that I think that's the simple answer to that

is probably sure and that's that's fine too but then but we don't know I mean like to the degree that there's been archaeological investigations into the kinds of biblical narratives that you've described the archaeological evidence tends to fall on the side of historical accuracy in relationship to the Bible quite surprisingly often clearly your your I mean you you spent more time in Exodus than probably any person I've ever met in person right clear the story sort of captivates you and you think it's really important and and and can a lot of course it's infinitely deep

story I think most people speaking to you already know that you think that right and so when they ask you a question when when they suddenly say to you but do you think it really happened well what the hell does that mean you you you must know that what they mean is what I was talking about a second ago which is that sort of um what what okay so fine so it's easy just to turn this around it's like okay what exactly happened in in your historic account when Moses encountered the burning bush I don't

need to know exactly what happened what I need to know is I'm not asking you specifically or attacking you for that what I need to know is that if I sort of went to the Egyptian desert at sort of the time that this story is alleged to have take taken place in history would I see a mass movement of Israelites from Egypt into the promised land would I see people with feet walking through the desert leaving foot well let's let's let's take it part rationally so but you also understand that when when someone's asking that

and you want like even if you don't like the question you must understand what someone's asking understand many of the things that they're doing simultaneously you must also understand that when you then say it's still happening yeah people just go what are you talking about yeah well I would say that's not my problem but it's it's it becomes a problem when you understand that someone's asking a quite benile historical question yeah but you don't get to do that but why not because the stories that you're dealing with aren't banel I agree but like uh one

so you can't reduce them to something B even if it's even if it's what would you call it even if it's reassuring this actually happened it's well then what do you do with the burning bush this actually happened one comparison I would make is um between this and talking about Fiction more broadly yeah right well you got it right earlier you know I would say you KN you noted that the the the stories in the in in the in the biblical Library leap across genres right well we know this because sometimes they're poetry and sometimes

s yeah exactly so so in any given story there's going to be historical account plus mythological overlay and you know you have to be a discriminating reader to kind of see what's different and you don't just get to say well all the mythological symbolism is historical reality it's like no it's not but here's the thing for example so like take take a piece of trivial fiction like Forest Gump yeah right we say like okay did that happen now I I think that what you probably say is something like well I don't think the events literally

occurred but I think that they obviously get at something that's sort of perennially true about human nature suppose I said they happened they existed as a pattern but there's a but there's a scene in Forest Gump when you know he I think he meets the president is it JFK at the time I think he goes and meets John F Kennedy yeah and so I said to you well well is is JFK the the like that part of that specific part of that story is it is it true that JFK was the president right and you

would probably just say yeah yeah you you wouldn't say anything more complicated and even though the subject as a whole of like is Forest Gump true is Hamlet true that's a complicated question very but specifically when I say ah but interestingly there's this there's this there's this little point I want to make in this board of discussion do you think that that JFK was actually the president you would say yes why do you think it matters to people like I don't know these are ancient accounts let's say may that's the biggest problem maybe that's the

biggest problem that that you have with the people who were asking these it is why what what point are you trying to make here the point is I know what the point usually is is the people who are asking the question believe that true in uniring means objectively happened in history like the things that we're seeing right now happen yeah it's like well no that's not how that's that's what not what those stories are like for me some of it is but for a Christian when asking you that it's probably because for them they have

an understanding of Christianity that requires believing in that kind of Truth for me and the reason why I hope that like me asking these questions will be less frustrating to you is because I have no desire for that I I don't care about that I'm genuinely just interested in what you think and so my my my desire to know whether you think Exodus historically happened goes no further than a point of interest about your beliefs so there's there's elements of the especially the setup to The Exodus story that strike me as very very plausible historically

so for example the the Jews before the Pharaoh of that time were under the guidance and protection of Joseph and the previous pharaoh and they regarded the Israelites as benefactors because they had Joseph had helped save the kingdom and his people were welcome but that was forgotten and so the new pharaoh and the new Egyptians regard the appallingly successful Jews as destructive Interlopers and they make them slaves it's like well can you believe that it happens all the time it's happening right now so it's very in this particular case saying it's very plausible it's like

saying something like well yeah it could have happened I don't know well I I don't know I don't think anybody knows so when somebody asks did The Exodus really happen that that word really when they say if I really is the is the if I said did The Exodus happen and and I'd understand why you would then say well youve got to understand what kind of story this is fine but then if somebody says yeah but did it really happen which parts of it even if they're not expressing it very well like what they're getting

at there is they're trying to emphasize the the historicity they're trying to say but did it historically happen probably is what they mean by the word really there right but but the thing is it speaks of their see they have a the problem is is that Christians who ask that have a metaphysics that's not Christian MH so it's it's a nonstarter the question it's like you're asking me the question yeah a materialist atheist would ask and and you want me to give you an answer that bolsters your faith but the presumptions of your question are

Enlightenment atheistic so it's like I don't know how to play that game so do you think that to be a Christian you don't need to believe in the historicity of The Exodus or the resurrection of Jesus for example well I think those are separate issues actually okay yeah that's that's probably right as well and interesting you know I I spent uh last night is a bit of a time delay so it feels like longer but last night I was having a conversation with a with a friend of mine I said you know I'm speaking to

Jordan Peterson tomorrow I was thinking how can I prepare for this and we ended up my friend Sheen's his name we ended up having a conversation about whether whether Hamlet is real right and that was probably better preparation than anything else I could have done what I realiz question so take so take if somebody asks you know was Hamlet a real person sort of naively I say have you heard the story oh no is that is that a real person I would say no however there is a sense in which and I'm trying to understand

what you're saying here there is a sense in which there are a lot of characters infinitely many characters that Shakespeare never wrote about yeah right those characters seem to exist less than Hamlet does yeah even if Hamlet exists less than Jordan p and Alex oon do in the in Hamlet might exist more than than me me and you well okay one of the things you one of the things you okay one of the things you pointed to in the analysis that you did of a talk I had with Jonathan Paso is my uh somewhat tongue

and cheet comment that God is the ultimate fictional character yes right which I think is a hilarious line by the way yeah but which by the way I think I misunderstood now now that I've I've watching that back that's that's the thing I say I think I might have misunderstood and maybe that's what you about to tell me I should interrupt let's walk through that yeah because people see and this is part of this underlying materialist atheist Enlightenment ethos people think that fiction and fact are opposites it's like no they're not okay not at all

okay so so let's let's let's use an analogy to begin with what's more real things or numbers okay now I'm not going to make a case for either of those positions I'm just saying that's an actual question yeah you talk to mathematicians they think well numbers are way more real than things things are Evan they disappear they Flash in and out of existence numbers are permanent and then you could you could think about it biologically it's like well how useful is numeracy to survival like very right when when when you become numerate you're powerful in

a way that the mere grip you have on the individual facts doesn't afford at all so there are forms of abstraction that are clearly more real than the things from which they're abstracted or at least as real I would say more real CU they're so powerful well fiction is an abstraction sure right and so Hamlet did Hamlet exist it's like Hamlet is the pattern of character that existed in multiple people over a very long period of time and so Hamlet is an abstraction like raskolnikov in crime and punishment did raskolnikov exist it's like raskolnikov existed

in the soul of every Russian from like 1850 to 1990 right and so is it real it's like it's hyper real yeah fiction is hyper real it's a meta truth as you put exct now is that is that real well well when someone says is that if they've listened to what you've just said and understood it then if they still ask the question but is it real you must understand that what they mean is like you know did like did a woman did aliona Ivanova get hit in the head with an axe right like yes

or did that happen and and and again you could still resort to saying saying you know it it happened in the heart of every Russian who's ever thought about to that specific no right no is the answer and so and we we can say no with confidence because we know that that that Doki sort of thought this up yeah with something like the Egyptians walking through the desert we can't as confidently say something like no that didn't happen but we we'd have to be more more uh humble in saying something like I don't know but

the the comparison I made in this video I I put two two questions side by side you were you were asked by Douglas Murray you know uh did did risol noop exist and you say well well I think that the the events literally didn't happen but that kind of Misses something and there's something more to talk about and then you asked you know the pattern is extremely real sure then you asked about Kan and Abel you know the story of Kan and Abel happen like a famous you know the question did that happen you know

begs the question if you've got it you've got to cons and you sort of in a way that it seems strange to me that the ease with which you were able to say of of raskolnikov and DKI well no that didn't l happen of course but you've got to understand that there's another sense in which we've got to talk about the truth of the story well the kable story is is quite complex CU you could you could imagine easily that there was a fratricide at some point in the past that was of sufficient emotional magnitude

to have stories aggregate around it to have an account agregate around it so it's easiest to presume that there for because why not it's perfectly plausible that a primordial murder of that sort happened in the memory of that tribal people and was represented in that manner now it as the account and ilad has done a very good job of pointing out how this develops too you could think of iot's work on the mythologization of stories as an extension of Dawkins idea of the meme because ilad discusses in great detail how an account mutates to what

would you say to be maximally memorable across time so it mutates you can take there was a core that's true let's say in that in the narrow historical sense but the account mutates to be optimally adapted to the structure of memory that characterizes the humany and that comes out in story like like the story right right and you get a maximally memorable story now that's a meme is it true that's hard question because you see I think Kan and abble probably belongs more on the sort of brooding over the face of the waters category than

it does exodus category for example like so I I I I think we well there's very little detail in it that would make it a specific historical event right I mean because it's it's two generic brothers and there's a generic murder but but it's it's interesting too because even in the case of a specific fratricide let's say that actually happens in the world well there's all sorts of principalities involved in the background right so for example I spent a lot of time looking at Dylan Cable's accounting of his mental state before shooting up the Coline

High School yeah well you know if you read that it'll make your blood run cold he's obviously possessed whatever that means whatever that means things he happy to accept the word possessed um well look what he did KN knowing in Part I don't take this wrong way knowing that I'm speaking with you I I'm not going to take that as as literally as as I would if I was speaking to yeah well lit is a very hard thing in a circumstance like that because invited something in and it wasn't pleasant and it had its way

with him right and the and the the results although Dreadful were nowhere near as Dreadful as he was hoping they would be right it's dark and Is that real so what happened there it's like well one way of describing it is that you know a alienated young man shot up a high school another way of representing it which may be more true is that it was another what would you say punctuated episode of a cosmic drama that's been going on forever it isn't obvious to me at all which of those two accounts is more real

well depend depends on what specific questions being asked for example right now now suppose that you were a witness to this crime and the police pull you into questioning as a witness yeah and they say we we're trying to ga information to try and you know catch the suspects suppose that there's no suicide involved you know the the suspects at large they're trying to get your help and they say so so so Dr peton what happened and you say well I think what happened was the continuation uh sort of a punctuation in in the long

paragraph of of the cosmic drama that is our human existence and was so that's not what we meant okay but like come on help me out here man like like really like and I think that's that's doing with the Rel question well that's a level of analysis so we went back when when when we started this discussion you talked about the infinite regress for purposes for writing an essay right so what are you doing when you're writing an essay well you're making horizontal and curved marks with a pen sure right well right so but but

there is a a cosmic tree of events in every micro event right and when when people when when they're looking for eyewitness testimony they're asking you for something like the highest possible level of narrow resolution you can manage in Miguel Chris just uh yeah right well I I just spoke with him and unfortunately I think we lost about half of the footage so I'm not sure how how much that will that will be seen in the world but but he he brought to my attention I'm sure he said it was John Ruskin who talked about

having a you you see in the in the garden you see like a a square and you think it's a you think it's like a white square in the garden inexplicably and then you go a bit closer and you see it's it's actually a page it's a book and then you look a bit closer and you see it's got words on it then you a microscope and you see actually it's got like ridges yeah you know and then you go a bit closer and you actually see atoms bumping into each other and you go a

bit closer and you see sort of waves and energy right and he sort of like well which of those is the real thing you saw did you know a baby's heart begins to beat at just 3 weeks at 5 weeks that heartbeat can be heard on ultrasound and this can sometimes be their only defense in the womb that's where pre-born steps in pre-born rescues 200 babies every day from abortion simply by providing mothers with an ultrasound after hearing her child's heartbeat and seeing its perfectly formed body in the womb she's twice as likely to choose

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[Music] docomo right well and the thing is is that that hierarchy that you just describe this is the cosmic tree of life this is idril it's like you have got the quantum level and the atomic level and the molecular level and so forth up to the phenomenal level that's not where it stops I started understand this when I was thinking something very peculiar this is decades ago thought people will go to a museum to look at Elvis Presley's guitar yeah it's like what the hell are they doing so you can imagine that you have a

a display case and you have Elvis's guitar in it and now you take that guitar out let's say it's a mass-produced guitar just for the sake of argument you replace it with a identical model from the same year yep okay now is that Elvis's guitar and people will say and you can think this so strange people would say well even if I couldn't tell the difference I would rather look at Elvis's guitar yeah and then you think well what is that some kind of delusion like what the hell's going on here no the answer is

this is what du shamp was on about when he think it was du shamp who put the Ural in the art gallery it's right what he was pointing to and it was brilliant was that much of what we perceive as concretely real is actually dependent on a hierarchical context that isn't part of the apprehension of the object so when you go to see Elvis's guitar yeah in a museum the perception is informed by the context it's like well you're an Elvis fan and you know a lot about Elvis history and you know that this is

Elvis's town and the object itself partakes in that higher order Unity that's the unity that extends off to Heaven every object partakes in that embeddedness above like for the reductionist types you'd say well what's this made of right it's like well it's it's molecules and then it's atoms and then it's like Quantum Quantum uh whatever the hell exists down in the quantum level that's what this is made of it's like wait a second it's on this table it's in this room it's of this time that's all this thing you know and that's that's that's the

higher order conceptualization but it's just as much part of the object yeah and and the a reductionist view doesn't take that into account and that's a big problem I think it's true that you know looking at ruskin's book piece of paper it would be silly to always say well what's that in the garden over there oh it's a bunch of atoms bumping into each other right that would be ludicrous well that's also so back to our discussion of darwinian utility it's like well it's the wrong level of functional analysis surely it would also be inappropriate

to do the opposite that is like to always to always think at a higher resolution than people are obviously sort of practically trying to so for example if I was close enough to see and I was interested in in what paper is made of and I said what is this and someone said oh it's a white square in the garden yeah so well that's inappropriate you've gone to focus down right and I feel like what where you might criticize the reductionist materialist for going to for going to too high a resolution thought too narrow you

go too wide on issues of uh religious historicity well you you want to hit the target squarely right and that's hard so in The Sermon on the Mount Christ addresses that to some degree so his injunction for paying attention properly takes local and distal into account simultaneously he says okay this is what you have to do first of all you Orient yourself so this is the highest level of or orientation right so this is the Divine orientation it's the thing at the top of Jacob's Ladder it's the value at the Pinnacle of the value hierarchy

you put what's properly highest first and foremost in the theater of your imagination right and then you align that with the belief that other people have the same intrinsic value as you and that are a reflection of that infinite value you start there then you pay attention to the moment yes right to TL sto wrote about this in his confession he sort of he was he was I I love it it's like 100 pages long you can you can read it in noted yeah it's a great book this wonderful uh account of of essentially him

sort of trying to battle with his his reason and his faith and he eventually concludes that he was looking in the wrong place he was looking amongst intellectuals and he found that he he he looked I think he sort of he quite dismissively call like the simple people you just your everyday person working man and he found that it was something about sort of you know if you if you take someone who's who's starving and you bring him and you tell him to sort of take this metal pump and just pump it up and down

and don't tell him why and he does it then the water starts flowing it's like you have to actually do the thing you have to live out the thing and then you get to see why it's why why it works um so it's you know I I I understand that I think that's that's probably that's probably true he also says toll story that is in that in that same account that he found that the there was a there was a an exactly inverse correlation between the specificity of an answer and like the importance of the

question I can tell you exactly how many molecules are in that glass of water but who cares right it's not relevant and the more the question becomes about you know Humanity human life the important stuff the less specific the answer necessarily has to become so I understand there is a there is a you so so you you you've you've alluded there to or or indicated the relevance of value for perception right you nailed it with that observation because as you pointed out any phenomena can be analyzed at a multitude multiple levels of of of the

hierarchy that it exists within okay so what makes the choice of level of analysis appropriate well it's something like it is something that's akin to darwinian utility it's something like that you you can think about it less abstractly is that you want the the level of resolution that gives you maximal functional grip in relationship to your Pursuit AB okay so what's your Pursuit well two questions what is your Pursuit and what should your Pursuit be well your Pursuits necessarily nested inside a hierarchy of Pursuits and when I said that God is the what would you

say the ultimate Pursuit that sits at the apex of the progression of Pursuits that is Jacob's Ladder that's what that's indicating in that vision is that every Every Act of perception unites Earth and Heaven Y and the perception itself is invisibly dependent on whatever it is you're worshiping like here's one problem right because I I I think I see what you're saying and I hope you know what I tried to do in in making that that that video essay about your religious views and uh I I suppose I wasn't the main thing I was trying

to do was sort of offer an interpretation trying to get to grips within and I I hope that you feel as though at least I'm I'm making an effort here to defitely to really try and try and get what you're thinking at um one problem is that you know in the early church there was a debate around the physicality of Jesus's resurrection yes so the canonical tradition ends up uh stipulating that Jesus physically resurrects and you must believe that otherwise you're her and that's part of the EMP the Catholic particular emphasis on the Divinity of

the body which has a real wisdom rather than a disembodied Soul you're also you also have like the nostic tradition the broadly speaking the Gnostic tradition in early Christianity that's so popular that valentinus nearly valentinus nearly becomes the bishop of Rome he's nearly the pope you know and um there's I I I talked about this the other day and I should have looked it up I can't remember which Church Father it was that was was telling the the church Community the early Church community when you go to a new place don't ask to be taken

to the Christian church are to be taken to the Catholic church because otherwise you might end up in a gnostic Church it so popular right right and a lot of the Gnostic tradition says that the thing that that's being gten wrong is the idea that there was this literal Resurrection right no no the kingdom of God is here and now the resurrection is inside of you and you you attain it through nosis I mean the Gospel of Thomas which is probably the most famous non-canonical gospel and could have been written um at the same time

as like the Gospel of John this is early text doesn't even mention the resurrection doesn't of crucifix it's a list of sayings yeah and the the very form of that book as as one scholar whose name I've forgotten unfortunately has pointed out of that of that collection shows that these people believed that the thing that's important is not what Jesus did but what he said the thing that's important is the knowledge the thing that's important and so so this Resurrection stuff sort of doesn't matter now the thing is in that early Church community somebody who

said well this question of like the resurrection as a physical you know historical event that you're kind of missing the point the thing that matters is like you know the resurrection that takes place inside of every person yeah it sort of sounds a little bit like the kind of approach that you would take now if that's true that would mean that in the early church you'd have been condemned as a heretic so so when a modern Catholic says to you you know Jordan Peterson are you a Christian you know what do you think about Catholicism

um I think that the reason that they're interested is because if it's true what I'm saying then they would have to say oh I suppose at least according to my understanding of Catholic that's a of count you number so I think that's probably why people are interested and I wonder if well that's a gen that's a that what would you say that would constitute a genuine form of inquiry for sure and I wonder if you feel like you're I mean I don't know I mean see one of the things I really like about the the

the the the the bodily tradition of the Resurrection is that it see what it does That's So remarkable is that it doesn't desacralize the body that's very very important you know the the I think the fundamental problem with gnosticism is that it becomes a it's very easy for it to become a Doctrine that's contemptuous of the body and contemptuous of the of the material world great deal of the nostic tradition literally believes that the material world is created by an evil Dem right exactly well exactly exactly exactly Jesus to save us the insistence on the

bodily Resurrection is a medication against that and it's an effective one I I would really love to ask uh about Genesis this might be a bit of a tangent and tell me if if it's if it's uninteresting to you but there's one Gnostic text call called the testimony of truth that was discovered in the nakadi library and this is buried probably around 300 ad so it must be earlier than that it's a fairly early text and this text identifies the serpent in the Garden of Eden with Christ and this is fascinating to me because when

I when I read as a leader to illumination yes tradition that makes the serpent a higher God than the original God because he's the agent that calls to conscience yeah now of course Ser yes now the serpent doesn't is never identified as as Satan or the devil except by except by Christian tradition it's just the serpent now there's so much interesting about this when I when I first read the the the Genesis what when I well even the classic Christians often regarded the fall as the what would you say faithful but Heaven Sent error that

made the Incarnation of Christ both possible and right so there there's it's very interesting because there's a gloss on that where even in traditional Christianity the becomes that's right yeah it gives you Christ and and Jesus so Point can Compares himself to a serpent in the Gospel of John you know um early in early yes you he'll lifted up likees up the insanely Prof see that's one of the passages actually sorry I don't want to derail you from your tangent but um that's one of the passages that I've concentrated a lot in this new book

that I've just finished uh uh we who wrestle with God because that equation that Christ manages with his I identification with the serpent in the desert that is so stunningly brilliant that I cannot possibly imagine how anyone could have thought it up it's to to to identify him with the source of the poison that to gaze upon what would you say redeemed the Israelites in the desert it's so there's so much in that that it's it's it's it's really a kind of miracle that serpent on the Stak that's sleepus it's the same symbol yeah so

that just in itself is something stunning there is something there is something amazing that I think of well obviously I'm not going to go as far as saying that I can't imagine that was thought up maybe not by somebody it's complicated with the Bible of course um and there's a lot to say there I mean I mean the author of The Gospel of John is obviously a sort of theological genius in the way that the authors of the synoptic gospels at least weren't as much um so you know it's it's it's believable to me that

that that that could be the case but but besides the point um because that would that that's another complicated thing to talk about but when I first I I it wasn't the first time but the first time I really tried to read the the Genesis account of the garden of be and I was doing it in the service of sort of producing a video I was I want to make sure I want to revisit the story make sure I sort of understand it properly um I I'm reading this text and God says You must you

you can eat of any of the any of the trees but not the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil and immediately you think to yourself why not you know why why wouldn't and some people like to say oh it's because that's actually by eating of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil you get to dictate morality doesn't read like that to me it reads to me like knowledge of Good and Evil let's just take it at face value to to start with it's like why not God why not well we're not

told but don't do it because in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die yeah now the serpent comes along and the serpent is described as more cunning than any of the animals that God God created yeah um I don't speak Hebrew unfortunately but where it says you know for example more more cunning than any of the the the beasts that God had created that could mean of all of the beasts that he created or more cunning than the beasts that he had created almost as if this is a a being in

in the garden that that God himself didn't actually create or God isn't sort of connected to in the same way because why is the serpent there in the first place is a question that's worth asking you know okay that's for sure so you have the serpent and and that word cunning I thought to myself what does that mean so I so I I looked it up and it's it's the word like arum or arum I don't know how to pronounce it but I looked elsewhere in the Old Testament and it's used in a few different

ways you know it means cunning it means subtle subtle yeah throughout Proverbs it's used to it's used consistently to mean sensible mhm what do I mean prudent and so there's one reading of this you know now now the serpent was more sensible than any of the other Beasts of the Garden of Eden and he comes to Eve and says did God say that if you eat of that tree you'll surely die and she says yeah that's what he said and he says you will not surely die in the day that you eat thereof you'll just

God just knows you'll become like him knowing good and evil and he doesn't want that so Eve looks at the fruit and she eats the fruit and does she die in the day thereof well again a complicated question but on face value no she doesn't die she gives them to Adam he doesn't die and what does happen well God says to them or God says now they have become like us knowing good and evil they must be banished from the garden so they do not Outreach outstretch their hand and and and eat from the Tree

of Life So it seems to me that you've got this serpent who could plausibly be described as the most sensible of the animals telling Eve immen the people the people who regard Milton Satan as what an admirable revolutionary tend to have the same attitude towards the serpent in the garden and it's a complicated it's a very complicated issue because even to the degree that the serpent is an agent of Lucifer which I think is an extraordinarily profound what reading and overlay on that initial story I think it's remarkable Lucifer is the bringer of light right

the spirit of Jesus himself is referred to as Lucifer at one point in in the in the gospel which is which is quite a fascinating uh well side not I guess the question is like illumination to what end I I do think that the interpretation that you rejected um with regard to the consumption of the fruit of the knowledge of the tree of Good and Evil is moral presumption it's the sin that nche suggests to everyone as the medication for the death of God we have to Define our own values it's like no we can't

but it's knowledge of good you know yeah but it but it's it's it's more than that it's it's the it's the consumption of the essence of moral knowledge itself it sounds to me that like I I can never you know contradict ex aesus sure like that that might may be the case but if I if I read this text naturally if I just say well like how does this naturally read to me yeah it reads to me like you have and when I that's why I brought it up because you consider this Gnostic tradition right

the evil demiurgic creator of the universe and like you have and and and the author of The testimony of truth says you know what God is this what God is this that that that firstly you know condemns man for wanting to eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil and secondly lies to him about what's going to happen when he does and and recognizes and and we're missing like 50% of the text like it's it's ripped to ripped to shred these Gnostic texts it's fascinating I think the the Gospel of Judas spent

about 30 years in a safety deposit box in New York City and nearly destroyed the whole thing it's fascinating story but so we don't know for sure but there's a point where it seems to identify this this serpent with with with Christ with Jesus and reading that I'm like that that makes makes a lot of sense to me on on a Surface ref the ambivalence about the human rise to self-consciousness right is that a good or is that something good or something evil because why does God then say now they've become like us knowing good

and evil they must not be allowed we must banish them lest they reach out their hand and and and eat from the Tree of Life yeah and sort of then guards Eden with the with the sherban with the with the Flaming sword like it seems that God is saying you know because because we're told that because of the fool now man can't inherit eternal life and Jesus must come to must come to save him but as soon as they eat of this tree God banishes them they don't they don't God banishes them I don't have

an interpreted problem with that part yeah that that's I don't know what sense to make of that I should ask Jonathan Paso because I suspect he'd have something to say about that yeah I think that the one way of interpreting the account of the Fall is that it was the inevitable consequence of Adam and Eve's overreach sure and so they end up banished not so much because God wants them out of the garden but because they're in their pride they threw themselves out of the garden in their overreach and I wrote about this it's very

hard for me to generate the entire interpretation on the Fly I wrote about this extensively in this new book that I'm publishing in November trying to take apart that particular issue because I what what seems to happen in in the Adam and Eve account is that you have you have an illusion to the function of male and female Consciousness first you have Adam who names and subdus and orders right so he's an extension in some ways of the logos right in in human form and God's curious enough about that to bring everything to Adam to

just see what he'll name yeah but the command is for Adam to put everything in its proper place in this hierarchical organization with its proper name and Adam can do that if he's the an adequate and faithful reflection of the logos then Eve is created as the counterpart to that and it's something like well there's an ordering tendency and there's the order that that produces but then there are things that are on the margin that aren't accounted for by the divine order and they need a voice and Eve is the voice of you think about

this biologically what does a woman do in the context of a family she brings the attention to that which is vulnerable and has not yet been properly Incorporated so well what do you what do you mean by that well imagine that you have a well-constituted family and there's a new baby M well the baby doesn't fit in mhm the baby is an anomaly the baby is an individual that has its own idiosyncrasies and the mother who's sensitive to the needs of the infant she's going to be the voice of that she's going to knock on

the door of the ordering principle and say you need to make some adjustments here so that what can't fit does if it feels because yeah and again I I I'm trying to be to who understand what you're saying and trying to be charitable it does seem to me that this is an unnatural interpretation uh in that sort of it seems like maybe it's it's too much like I I don't know that's that's you can make that work right you can make that work but there's always this is this is the kind of objection that Sam

Harris had to the sorts of things that I said he said well you can interpret a cookbook that way exactly yeah well and this is look this is a huge problem this is the problem the postmodernists dangled in front of everyone it's like well what's the canonical interpretation of a text the answer is no one knows right and so does that mean that there's an infinite number of interpretations per text yes which one's correct hey now that problem I think to some degree has actually been technically solved while the large language models do this okay

you bet so so I've been talking to one of my colleagues about a new discipline which is something like computational epistemology well because the the large language models track patterns of inter relationships between words okay so when you're trying to interpret something like the story of Adam and Eve the the story is the words the story is the letters the story is the words the story is the phrases the story is the sentences and the paragraphs and the chapters and the whole biblical Corpus plus the entire bloody culture and all of that bears on those

interpretation so you say well am I overreaching my interpretation in relationship to Adam and Eve and I would say well that that's a very difficult question and it's possible to overreach and it's possible to over interpret I mean specifically with with the with the female in the family well the thing is though that that that there I mean could any other person like having not listened to this conversation and not and not spoken to dsts would know that but any other person in in the world sort of read the story of Adam and Eve and

similarly say well I think that this is because is representing what a woman does in a well oriented family which has to do with you know when you have a child it's sort of a it's an anomaly it's something something new and and it's the woman that brings well that's Eve Eve stands for the voice of the serpent the thing that's excluded that's true but but that's that's exactly the point is that that's exact so would would someone else come to that conclusion um I would say well people can make that decision for themselves when

they read the text but I would say it's very much keeping let's say with DST interpretations of what masculine and feminine are it's not it's not an infallible way to understand uh whether an interpretation is correct but I think it's helpful to know if if you read a novel there's that there that sort of joke that school children make about like doesn't matter what a novel says it'll be like the curtains were blue and and the English Je will say well let's unpack that let's look at what that means right and and people make fun

of that because they that's their experience in school yeah I I think that one way to understand if we're doing this appropriately is if two people simultaneously think oh actually the fact that the curtains were blue is significant here if you consider this so it seems to point to that if if people can independently even if they don't get it quite the same recognize it that's sign well it's helpful to understand that there's something yes definitely legitimate about that kind of definitely this is actually part of the reason that I was so became so interested

in the union ilad Eric neyman School of mythological interpretation because that's exactly what they did was they took patterns of interpretation let's say of masculine and feminine from multiple cultures and looked for overlap yeah okay when I wrote maps of meaning so I did that I used the union Works in that regard but I also used what I knew about neuros pychology and neuropsychopharmacology with the presumption being that if all of these pointers pointed to the same thing it was probably there that's multi method multi trait construct validation fundamentally and the notion is the your

senses do the same thing if your eyes and your ears and your sense of smell and your taste and your touch all report the same thing then you have a reasonable probability of assuming of surviving if you assume that it's true now that's not perfect because the reason we talk is that I don't want to just rely on my own senses even though there's five of them so I've got a a quint angulation happening which is a pretty decent way of specifying truth I want to know if you if your perception shows concordance right we

want this converging evidence now it's trickier with textual interpretation you know partly it's trickier too because mere consensus is not sufficient you need you need deep expertise okay so why would I say that well we have these large language models for example and they're doing statistical analysis of textual inter relationship at every level right billions of parameters so the letter conjunctions the word conjunctions the phrase conjunctions the sentence conjunctions the whole bloody thing but even there prone to go astray and the reason for that is that they're overweighted to the present like so we have

the alignment problem as a consequence which is well how do we trust the AI interpretations well the same problem obtains for human beings the alignment problem how do we align ourselves well that's what a classical education did right and that was steeping in the ancient texts why because the ancient texts are distillations of patterns that have existed over thousand thousands of years and if you know the patterns you Orient yourself properly and that also makes you immune to see the problem with the convergence notion is it can produce a False Consensus like every all the

Nazis agreed well that's a problem because they were wrong you think we should be sending chat gbt to Bible School absolutely absolutely while we've been I have a colleague we've been training AI systems on classic texts they're way more useful I use one all the time we haven't released it how how is it more use like it's not woke seriously it's not ideologically ad but but surely it is it's I mean it's it's it's ideologically um it's it's ideologically controlled and confined just in a different way no I don't think it's ideologically conf ideology typical

post ideology doesn't need to be bad especially given that like as as a non-believer in Christianity I see Christianity as an ideology right that's a good objection this goes go back to the point that you made this goes back to the point you made about people taking the right to themselves to define the moral order let's say in the Garden of Eden okay so what's the problem with that the problem is is that the proper interpretation is bounded by the actuality of the cosmic order right so it isn't the postmodernist say well it's just one

ideology it's either this one or this one and but then that's all grounded in power as it turns out so they got something at the bloody Pinnacle anyways that that that that philosophy either degenerates into a kind of incoherent nism or it turns into a power play it's like no there are canonical interpretations well what are they well that's what's encapsulated in the religious text is canonical interpretations okay why are they canonical okay I'll give you an example you tell me what you think about this is good this is a good rejoiner to D to

Dawan selfish J right okay so God is Con calized in the story of Abraham as the Call to Adventure yeah okay so Abraham is privileged he's Rich he's in a state of infantile security he doesn't have to do a damn thing till he's like 70 his Rich parents he doesn't have to lift a finger okay and then a voice comes to him that says get the hell away from your zone of comfort leave your family leave your tent leave your community go out in the world okay well so what is that well that's the same

impulse that drives a child to develop it's the impulse that drives a a man to continue to mature right so you can think about it as an instinct if you want the instinct to growth okay God makes Abraham a deal it's it's such a stellar deal he says look if you listen to this voice of Adventure if you commit to it if you live by its dictates and you make the proper sacrifices along the way this is what will happen to you you'll be a blessing to yourself okay so that's a good deal that's a

nice start right so you don't have to be miserable and self-conscious right aware of your own nakedness you can start to walk with God again okay but more you'll do that in a way that will ensure your valid reputation so that's a good deal because you want to have a reputation that's distributed in the social Community obviously and if it's based on something real so much the better then you're not a charlatan or a fake or a psychopath okay but that's not all he said you'll do that in a way that will enable you to

establish a permanent Dynasty that will Cascade down the generations and that's not all either you'll do all that in a way that's beneficial to everyone else so this is so cool because it speaks of it's something like the tree of life it speaks of a concordance right between the instinct to mature and develop this that calling of Adventure the pathway that actually works best for you the pathway that works best for you and establishes something permanent in a manner that enhances your reputation that Cascades down the generations okay now Abraham is offered if he follows

this pathway God says well you'll be the father of Nations okay so imagine this this is Contra the selfish Gene let's say the human pattern of reproduction Dawkins mistake was that he thought reproduction and sex were the same thing and they're not they're not especially not in the human case because human beings are high investment long-term maters right sure so we have very few Offspring and we invest like Matt in them parir Bond you live long enough to be grandparents you put a multi okay so that means that to be the proper father you have

to act out a sacrificial ethos okay the the idea in the story of Abraham is that if you act out that sacrificial e thought properly which aligns the spirit of adventure with the harmony of the community you will act in a manner that best ensures the long-term survival of your Offspring right so you can imagine it's not just the contribution of sperm to egg it's the development of an ethos of paternal care that increases the probability that your children will be successful but also in a way that increases the probability that their children will be

successful all right so that's an alignment with a genuine Cosmic order not arbitrary and so there are interpretations will'll say they're not just ideologies they're not just arbitrary interpretations of the way the world lays itself out they are in harmony with the cosmic order and that's what makes them deep sacred fundamental and and and in the truest possible sense that is the proper rejoiner to the postmodernists it's like see this is why they insist this why they're so anti-science in their ethos too this is where Sam Harris has got a point because Harris likes to

make a case for objective morality objective it's like Transcendent is the right word not objective but did it um did it actually happen though I'm I'm kidding what I what I was really interested thinking about that and I I just had three hours with Sam Harris where we sort of went around on on that question and I I agree that I think his system fails essentially for what it's worth um he's got a point he wants to ground Morality In something that isn't a mere postmodern illusion and there's something to be said for that I

want to know how much like the story of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible the story of Abraham okay train a large language model on that because it's it's uh you know integrated into the into the cosmic order however you want to say it how far do you go with this I mean like do you train this this model on the New Testament do you train it on the Epistles we're playing with that I don't know you train on joh milon good good question Dante Dante well so imagine that's a very good question so

imagine that at the foundation you have the biblical Library okay but then you have like you said the secondary literatures what about the Quran we want to train a separate one on the Quran then we want to have them debate yeah well it's really interesting in the case of Islam because there's an insistence in the Islamic world that the entire epistemology is is actually contained in the text and nothing else I think the mistake that people make in comparative religion between Islam and Christianity is that they think that the Bible in Christianity is what the

Quran ISL that's just not the case in Islam the word becomes a book and in Christianity the word becomes a person I Think Jesus is to Christianity what the Quran is to Islam right AB probably and that's a big difference I think that's a mistake that people make partly because you know I mean the Quran is infallible right you can't you can't think that any word of the Quran is wrong because it's the literal and altered word of God the you've got AIT more more leeway say it's mythology or maybe there's a historical contradiction but

it's not actually that much of a problem however if you had Jesus in front of you you can't contradict him right I think I think that's an important distinction for people to for people to keep in mind um I well that also makes yeah that also makes the logos The Living Word yeah right which is very that is a very makes it more difficult to to put forwards the the somewhat naive criticism that I think people often make of the Gospels as as contradicting each other because again like we're talking like historically here you know

was Herod on the throne at the same time cinius was the governor of Syria as L and it's sort of like in a sense who cares I mean one of the points that um my friend my friend John Nelson has has made brilliantly is have you ever come across the concept of the um what do they call it the the the churchillian drift where a bunch of quotes that Churchill never said just get of tributed to him you know I find I find part that's part of the pattern of myth a if someone says yeah

I think they fall into his orbit because they're of his type I think the best breakfast in the morning is a glass of champagne a hearty glass of champagne right he never said that but people sort of think maybe he said sounds like something Church same thing happens with CS Lewis now the point that that my friend John pointed out to me was said well if if all you had the only information you had about Winston Churchill was a book of apocryphal quotes that people had attributed to him and agreed that he'd said yeah you'd

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your relationship with God download the hall app today at hall.com Jordan for an exclusive 3-month trial that's hall.com Jordan yeah well and that's that's something you can do the well that's partly because you while you you while you put something you see let's say that let's say that there's a shape there's a three-dimensional shape on the wall and you want to the walls like flat white you can't really see it so what you want to do is you want to throw a bunch of like garbage at the wall so to speak and the outline despite

the fact that everything you throw at the wall is garbage and it lands in many different places if you throw if you throw enough of it at the wall you'll get the shape yeah well that it's partly because you could imagine that there's a set of Apocrypha there's a set of sayings that have been what misremembered a fairly comprehensive set there you're still going to be able to extract signal right from there's going to be noise there's going to be signal there that's part because the truth will be encoded in the panoply of the that's

why it's a bigger problem if somebody points out like some flat historical uh if if there was discovered just like a flat historical contradiction in in the Quran that'd be a big problem because the Quran is the literal word of God if someone points out a flat historical contradiction in the Gospels it kind of doesn't matter as much because you're able to to accept that maybe that is just a contradiction but the thing that matters is the word of God and the word of God is not the Gospel of Luke or the Gospel of John

but the person that they were sort of writing about well that's that's also partly you see that that you you just pointed to another reason why I don't like the over concretized questions it's like you're looking for truth in the wrong place there buddy I understand that but it also depends on what kind of truth you're looking for right because for me as an interested third party everything depends on that I'd really like to know if if if Jesus actually rose from the dead as a historical fact I'd love to know if there was a

real Exodus you know like that's really interesting and important to me now as somebody who who doesn't believe that those things did happen I still have access to the to the meaning of the story of something like a resurrection well let's assume just for the sake but I'm not a Christian it's not enough for me to say well you know do I believe that you know self-sacrifice is at the basis of of of a meaningful life oh maybe but that's not enough to make me a Christian because I don't believe it's the case I'm also

I'm I'm quite interested actually how I mean you're obviously quite attracted to to Christianity in the Christian story um I mean you Jesus on your jacket but but but I I'm I'm interested how that um how that dovet tales with your insistence on personal responsibility as uh the way to live a proper and meaningful life given that the story of Jesus is one of vicarious Redemption I sort of throw my sins on him you know I I he takes responsibility for the sins that I've committed yeah well I you know I'm I wonder how go

together well I'm what would you say no Jesus Jesus up really good to have a Divine Ally and I I think the more uniring you aim upward the more you walk with God and that does mean that Christ is beside youh and so that is a reflection of the truth of vicarious Redemption but that doesn't mean you have nothing to do right and and Christ makes that very clear in the gospels um not everyone who says Lord Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven right only those who do the will of my father you must

be willing to hate your brother and your well there there's it just see there there's a tension there because the vicarious Redemption idea is a reflection of the mercy of God it's like if you and I I believe this to be the case as I said if your aim is upward then God is your ally right and so he's there with you bearing the cross but you're still obliged to carry it right and and you see that in the story too that's embedded in the passion story because there's an insistence in traditional Christianity that the

suffering and the death that a man would experience in that situation were real despite the fact that God was also experiencing it right so there's this Duality and I think that's reflected in the idea of arious Redemption when it's understood properly it's like yes you'll have here's another way of thinking about it is that if you aim upward uniring you have the spirit of what's good what are you saying you you've established a relationship with the spirit of what's the highest good well then that's with you and that's that's that's that's not just a reality

it's like the Ultimate Reality it's it's partly it's it's n alluded to that when he said if you have a why you can bear any how well what why well the ultimate why well what does that enable you to do to Bear the ultimate how and that's exactly what the passion story is and so there is a vicarious Redemption there because if you do it properly you don't have to do it alone but that doesn't mean that there's nothing on you you know and and you see that too there's an insistence in the entire biblical

library that what humans are called to do is real like we're we're made in the image of God we're participating in the process by which possibility is transformed in order we're building as far as I'm concerned we're we're either building the city of God or we're building its alternative right with the domain of Hell actually right actually really as well as metaphysics I mean that it's interesting you say hell and actually in the same sentence because well it's easier to Believe In Hell than Heaven well one of the other criticisms that I made of you

in this video was that I I felt like you were appropriating religious language illegitimately to apply a sense of the Sacred to profane things to to mundane things and that's perhaps one example so I can give you a few examples I mean one is um implied in what you just said there but you said it I think explicitly to to Matt frad recently uh on on PS with the quess where you said if if you have studied any amount of history and you don't believe that hell is real right right then you're an idiot yeah

defitely I understand I think what you mean by that because hell like you know hell is a place on Earth in in many respects right like like if you study history and and you look at just like what what levels of depravity Humanity can sync to like and you could you could quite poetically say well if hell isn't the right word to describe that then I don't know what is say something like that right but clearly a theological conception of hell does not exist on Planet Earth it's somewhere you go after you die it's not

so clear I wouldn't say it's so clear C well certainly not in um in the in like the Jewish tradition um and and okay maybe D maybe not in the okay maybe not but like I mean like a a modern Christian who asks you for example do you believe in hell and you know that what they mean they mean the place you go after you go after you die then when you respond and say sort of well of course hell is real but you don't believe in hell have you studied any amount of History if

if you've if you know it's sort of it feels like you're sort of describing two different things equivocation the other area where this this this largely happens I think is when you said that the very Act of doing science see there there's a concordance there between that concept of Eternal punishment in the afterlife and the hell that is that unites all totalitarian States but I don't know what the concordance is like it's it's I I don't understand like do do you do and I don't speculate generally on anything that's let's say Beyond Death I mean

what the hell can you say about that I don't have anything to say about that but that's another I don't know point right so if I ask you for example you know do you think that Hitler is being punished now you know I mean he's dead but is he being punished or or did he ever get punished see the the answer to that question is something like what is the relationship between the evanescent consciousness of man and Eternity and the answer is we don't know yeah when M Fred asked you do you believe in an

afterlife you said that something like your behaviors or your actions resonate through eternity yeah well there's that which is you know in a way an evasive answer too but the thing is we don't we don't understand we exist in relationship to the infinite obviously what that relationship is I don't no one knows how to conceptualize that in the final analysis I don't understand the relationship between our binding temporally and Eternity like is there something permanent about our conscious experience I don't I don't know I think I think you you excite your Christian listenership when you

say like not only you know do I believe in hell but but you can't not believe in hell I mean are you serious you seriously don't believe in hell and they think ah here's a here's a here's a strong sort of warrior well and you go while the others but then they realize what what you mean by hell well it's so lots of human suffering and catastrophe you know on plan it's more than that because it's more than that you know because it is the case that the invitation to hell is offered by the Eternal

usurper of the moral order that's true you end up in hell because you lie that's also true and so but when you say that's true you end up in hell because you lie what do you mean well the totality toal allow to use the word hell right like what is the thing you're describing you end up where in a totalitarian state yes and that's fine a state of ultimate misery but I I think this is where somebody might be prone to confusion and you could say that's their fault maybe it is but if somebody's listening

to you and and do you believe in hell you say of course I Believe In Hell how can you not believe in hell and they go oh you know thank goodness because that that of course is my world you I'd love to know how I can defend my my vision of hell and then they realize that when you say hell what you actually mean is something like totalitarian guess I mean at least that sure right and so I'm often trying to make a minimal case right if I if I'm trying to elaborate on the meaning

of a religious text what I'm trying to say in all humility is it means at least this now does that cover the entire territory of the meaning that's very unlikely you're going to give an exhaustive account I don't think so what does that mean in eternity it's the same question and and then we should draw this part to a close it's the same question in some sense as the reality of the resurrection of Christ so the Christian interpretation is Christ defeats death and Hell mhm okay well The Logical objection to that is well where's the

evidence for the defeat MH since death still exists and so does malevolence well the Christians then will escape so to speak into something like a symbolic interpretation and say well it's true in eternity and and I think fair enough like like I do believe I do believe that the idea that Christ defeated death and hell is true but I don't know what that means yeah and so and that does that bother me well I'd rather know and I'm continuing to investigate it but I like I do know for example you know Anan her Ali who

recently became a Christian she just had a conversation with Richard Dawkins it hasn't hasn't gone out yet I was there I had the I had the privilege of being so I've already heard it you know I I know what they they spoke about but one of the things that that aan does is and I've described it as as sort of almost comical the way that aan talks about her struggle with depression suicidality total hopelessness and then finds that by praying she's able to sort of elevate her life and then Richard Dawkins sort of but do

you believe that Mary was a virgin when she gave bir you know it was funny it was I I great level of Anis problem at the same time I sort of understood it because yeah but and dorkin says you but truly when you go to church and you're having these these these feelings you must recognize that the things he's saying at the pulpit are nonsense andan said that she is that that she chooses to believe it she says she says that I no longer find it to be nonsense because she what she implied and I

don't want to put words in the mouth and I can't remember but it was something like look I I've been so captured by this this this meaning yeah that although I don't really understand what it means to say that you know Jesus was born of a virgin I just choose to believe it well now now that's fine but what she does what I was going to say is what she does is is says that this to me is like a mystery I I don't really know exactly what it means but I but I choose to

believe that it's true and I wonder if if if that's something like what you're doing here when you say that you you believe it's true I just tell my experience has been with in this sort of thing so I've spent a lot of time digging into the substructure of mythological accounts right in many different cultures yeah now and my experience continually is the deeper I look the more that's there and so and then I see things come together that make sense that I thought were desperate and that there doesn't seem to be any limit to

that and so now when I see things that are desperate or even contradictory I think well as you already pointed out given the nature of the biblical Library there's room for some contradiction but more than that I think well that might be illogical or irrational or I might just not understand it and my experience has been that that presumption turns out to be the case far more often than not and so you know you can imagine that you can get the apprehension of a pattern and you can think the pattern is the pattern is compelling

and then there are details within the pattern that you don't know how to reconcile but this is what aan is doing in accordance with your account it's like well I'm willing to I'm not willing to forego my view of the pattern because of some lack of concordance with details especially given that I'm ignorant yeah no like well I can I can only tell you what has been the pattern of my investigations it's like the more deeply I this is knocking and asking the more deep The More I Seek the more is present I guess you

know to to conclude I suppose here like like so suppose I'm somebody and and broadly this is this is this this is true you know I I I I think the gospel stories are are fascinating and resonant you know I I I like the idea of of of the the resurrection of Christ that the way that it's it's criticized as this evil human sacrifice I think is is misleading you know I I'm sort of I have all of those parts yeah right but I'm not a Christian and and I suppose the question in what way

are you not that's what I mean to to to help me understand what what you mean by this you know what is the difference between someone who's not a Christian and not they're not some new atheist type they're not like I I wouldn't worship God even they're just not a Christian and is the difference is like 90% Christian that's what people keep saying about him and I I think well I think partly because I do believe that he is committed to the truth he does believe that the truth will set you free he does believe

that there's an intelligible order yeah he believes that the investigation of the intelligible order is redeeming this is It's a shame we don't have a bit more time to do the science thing perhaps that will have to be another conversation so so you know who is and who isn't a Christian that's not an easy question and that's again why I started our conversation I think it's inappropriate for you to try to say who is and who isn't but but just abstractly like what you think the difference is like what is it that you know under

what conditions Christians hoist their cross and walk up hill right okay so I've heard you say that before as well right but like but that is that is what I think that's that's the difference not to sort of try to be too left brained about this but like in practice yeah what do you mean like perhaps two sort of symmetrical questions what conditions under which what are the conditions under which somebody say how careful are you with your words well um I try to be careful okay well that's that's a good approximation to Christian conduct

right because that's worship of the logos fine but but that's really a serious part of it I don't know if that that that will be enough I I certainly don't know if the word worship there is is particularly appropriate how how much how high how profoundly do you value it to the extent that it helps me to convey my ideas properly I don't worship the the the words that I'm using themselves have the words but the words are a tool and the reason that I'm precise as precise as I can be is in service of

trying to communicate my ideas to you for what purpose so that what I am whatever it is that I'm feeling or thinking in my head if I could somehow take a medical instrument and prod your brain to make the same thought arise that would be really helpful to me because you'd see the world how I see it that is what language is it's that tool except instead of prodding your brain with physical bit of metal and pting your ears with vibrations in the air but I'm trying to do the same thing I'm trying to make

that thought arise so that you can see the world as I do and so that I can see the world as you do to what to what end well um I don't know well how about um productive har harmonization of vision fine yeah it depends on the conversation right so like in this in this instance it will be um it will be I mean I came into this conversation I suppose with with with a goal to more thoroughly understand your world which which is which is which is more specific than than usually with these conversations

it would be let's try to uh learn something from each other and convince each other of something and in this case I really was just fascinated to sit down and try to understand you know what does Jordan Peterson think about religion like that's probably the goal which maybe is a slightly inappropriate goal to come into a conversation with but that's that's really what I've been been trying to been trying to understand so I suppose that's the goal so it's a the the idea we can wrap this up with with let's say a Christi observation is

that there's a notion a classical Christian notion that wherever two or more are together in Christ's name the spirit of God is there right okay so what does that mean well as far as I'm concerned what it means is that if you're uniring in your choice of words if you're seeking with them and exploring and I'm doing the same and then we do that together that's a mutually Redemptive process that spirals upward so that's that's a Christian endeavor one of the conditions under which somebody can say they're a Christian and be either lying or wrong

and the condition under which someone can say I'm not a Christian and be either lying or wrong if you see what I mean that's a very good question well something came to mind right away when you asked that question like for much instantly and said the the the redempt there's a there's a reason that Christ is represented as the person who took the sins of the world onto himself well that's the that's the essence it's like the world is a a fallen place and you have the responsibility to do something about that and the degree

to which you take that responsibility onto yourself that's the degree to which you are Christian follower of Christ it's not it's not an on andof switch that was it's unfair to frame it as such I suppose it's not like you either are an on on or off switch it's not like you're well I think you want to make a Christian or you're not it's like you're more or less when when Jacob decides to be a good person instead of a bad person he builds an altar and it signifies his willingness to sacrifice his his past

self I think that people decide in many ways and maybe multiple times whether they're going to aim up or not now that's that initial commitment a for it's like a baptism in a sense that you decided that you're going to aim up okay well now you can do that badly because you will and you see this in the Old Testament accounts of the prophets all the time a lot of them are pretty reprehensible when they first find their feet but you can stumble your way uphill and that that is what it that is the essence

of Christian belief is to to stumble your way uphill with the maximum load you can bear and the thing that's so fascinating about that is that that's also the pathway of maximal meaning and that meaning is exactly what enables you to Bear the load so it's a very it's a very paradoxical what would you say it's a very paradoxical reality and and I think the the essence of the ch faith is the imitation of Christ it's not the mouthing of the words now that doesn't mean the words shouldn't be in accordance with the commitment they

should be but but the commitment can't be reduced to the utterance the commitment is the carrying yeah right and the carrying in relationship to a goal in in the imitation of Christ it's in the imitation the uh the text the book you know the imitation of Christ um you won't be judged on you won't be judged on what you say about what you've done yeah well then I I don't mean that also doesn't mean that the treasure that you stack up on Earth is a indication of your Transcendent value right you don't want you shouldn't

fall into the justification by works heresy right but but with that Koda firmly in mind I don't think there's anything in that proposition that isn't in accordance with the gospel accounts I Christ calls on his disciples to be followers right to to walk the same path and they're given the power to do the same things because of that and Christ says himself that the people who come after him which means us will be capable of more than he managed right well that's that doesn't mean that there's no Redemption by proxy let's say because we already

covered that is that if you aim up you have the spirit that's inviting you up you've invited it to take residence in you and that's that's true that's true as far as I can see I think it's the most accurate way of construing the the situation that does give you a form of it gives you what I am found right it gives you a spine um but that doesn't that doesn't mean you don't have a cross right and and that you see that insistence in the gospel accounts as I said you know the insistence that

Christ suffered as a man despite having God what being God that's those are both true at the same time so the Christian pathway is the pathway of maximal self-sacrificial responsibility right right well I hope those who have been wondering uh whether you should be legitimately called a Christian in their worldview in their version of Christianity will will be helped by this by this conversation I mean I suppose that's in part what I'm I'm I'm trying to do too here is for people who who sort of who say to you you know just just say what

you think it's complicated you know but hopefully um well I am trying to say what I think it's just that you know the world's a complicated Place yeah well hopefully we're to make it's nice to get your words in pristine order but the more complicated the topic the longer it takes to manage that with Stellar Precision yeah well it's taking us more probably nearly two hours now just to to to get about around to the idea of maybe well maybe you don't know if if uh the Jews walked through the the Egyptian desert but maybe

that also they're still walk maybe maybe they're still walk good to talk to you it's been fun all right so everyone I'm going to continue this conversation we're going to continue this conversation on The Daily wire platform and so um I think I'll talk to Alex a bit something a bit more personally um I want to find out how he managed his podcast and why he's interested in the things he's interested in what his Pathway to that uh occupation was and what his hopes for the future are and all of that and so if you

want to join us on the daily wi side please do thank you to the film crew here we're in LA right we're in LA and thank you very much for coming all the way from London that it's very good and it was a fine conversation much appreciated enjoyed and thank you all of you who are watching and listening for your time and attention we hopefully we'll see you on the daily wire side and if not then well for the next podcast [Music]